Last year, Google Knol launched to a lot of hype and skepticism. While, at first, it looked like a possible Wikipedia-challenger, in reality, it didn't attract a lot of users or attention, even though some of the articles on the site are actually quite good and well written. Today, however, Google announced that the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization focused on providing free access to scientific and medical literature, will use Knol to give scientists a place to collaborate and share research on important topics, including influenza research.
Posterous, the increasingly popular minimalist blogging service, just launched its first iPhone application this morning. The app, called PicPosterous, allows users to upload pictures and videos to their blogs. Until now, the only way to upload this content was to email it to Posterous. The developers of the iPhone app still have to work out some kinks, but once the company fixes these issues, PicPosterous could quickly take over email as the most convenient way to upload media files to Posterous.
Late last year, we boldly proclaimed that your next computer might be a Linux PC. Thanks to the ever-growing market for the low-end machines dubbed "netbooks," this seemed like a real possibility at the time. But then, MSI's U.S. sales director Andy Tung had to come along and burst our bubble saying that the Linux machines were seeing a higher return rate than their Windows counterparts. For a while, that seemed it would be the end of hope for this next big "Linux for consumers" push. Or it was at least until this month, when Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, made a very different claim. He noted that return rates for Linux machines were about the same as those for Windows. Is this a second chance for the Linux netbook? Perhaps.
Sharein, the new bookmarklet-based service for link sharing, which launched earlier this summer, has just today introduced some new features which further solidify this up-and-comer as the new must-have tool for sharing links on the web. The service, already an easy way to share to Twitter, Facebook, and via email, is most notable for its ability to track statistics like views on the back end, a feature that should appeal to marketers looking for hard data on their social media efforts.
Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensable.
Do you remember college and all those textbooks you couldn't sell back to the bookstore? I do. I own one of the most expensive doorstop collections in existence. For this very reason, Flat World Knowledge is announcing record numbers on their open text book program. As of this coming September, more than 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will access the publisher's e-learning services and textbooks. Business and economics professors from across the country are flocking to the site to meet their students' needs. Given that the program started in Spring 2009, with only 1000 textbooks sold to 30 colleges, the growth for Fall 2009 is phenomenal.
You've seen the calls for open identity standards and data portability. Well, Social Beans aims to create standardized "skeleton portability" across social media publishing platforms. What is "skeleton portability"? According to co-founder Emre Sokullu, "Comments, forums, wikis, blogs, rating systems, tagging, sharing and bookmarking are all common social features of today's networking sites". Despite the fact that these are all common denominators of the web, developers continue to hack together their own proprietary implementations. Says Sokullu, "Social Beans aims to standardize a syntax around common social features including users, profiles, avatars, roles and news feeds." For developers, it's a pact for "development portability" or the agreement to follow the same rules for compilers.
College is a horrifying time in one's personal development. Aside from being "the best years of your life," those years are also those in which your expenditures outstrip your income by more than they ever will later (with any luck and ambition on your part, at least). They can also be some of your more strapped-for-time years and attention-deficit-overload years.
Here are a few tools we wish we'd had when we were still dorm-dwelling nobodies. Forward these links on to the collegiate folks in your life, and add your own favorites to the list. Together, we can rid the world of dropped classes and "ramen starvation."
We just got an invitation to a MySpace press conference with MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta that will start at 11:45am PDT. We also just received news that MySpace did indeed enter into an agreement to acquire the music recommendation service iLike. The financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
We will live blog the press conference, which should get underway shortly.
ReadWriteWeb is excited to announce that we are launching a partnership with technology consultancy Forum One Communications, focusing on online community management.
Forum One hosts events, offers consulting and publishes in-depth reports about the finer points of community management based on extensive survey data gathered from diverse practitioners.
All the recent talk about the future of tr.im and giving up control over our links on Twitter to third parties made us look into alternative solutions for shortening our links over the last few weeks. While there aren't too many alternatives to using hosted services for short links, we did come across two self-hosted solutions that you can install on your own hosting account: z.ips.me and Shorty. Both have some pros and cons, but they do give you total control over your short links.
